O9A Authority

Authority, Learning, and Culture,
In The Sinister Tradition Of The Order of Nine Angles

Abstract

“I claim no authority, and my creations, profuse as they are, will in the end be accepted or rejected on the basis of whether they work. Satan forbid they should ever become ‘dogma’ or a matter of ‘faith’. I also expect to see them become transformed, by their own metamorphosis and that due to other individuals: changed, extended and probably ultimately transcended, may be even forgotten. They – like the individual I am at the moment – are only a stage, toward something else.” Anton Long, 1990 ev

Authority In The Order of Nine Angles

In the 2011 text The Discovery and Knowing of Satan, Anton Long effectively summarized what the Order of Nine Angles (ONA/O9A) – that is, what he – had been consistently expressing for well over thirty years in respect of the individualism of the O9A. Thus he wrote that

“What matters is the individual developing, from their own years-long (mostly decades-long) practical experience, a personal weltanschauung: that is, discovering their own individual answers to certain questions concerning themselves, life, existence, the Occult, and the nature of Reality.” {1}

Over twenty years earlier, in a letter to Michael Aquino of the Temple of Set dated 20th October 1990 ev, he had written:

“We see our way as guiding a few individuals to self-awareness, to Adeptship and beyond, via various practical and magickal techniques. The emphasis is on guide, on self-development, on self-discovery. There is no religious attitude, no acceptance of someone else’s authority […]

I claim no authority, and my creations, profuse as they are, will in the end be accepted or rejected on the basis of whether they work (Satan forbid they should ever become ‘dogma’ or a matter of ‘faith’). I also expect to see them become transformed, by their own metamorphosis and that due to other individuals: changed, extended and probably ultimately transcended, may be even forgotten. They – like the individual I am at the moment – are only a stage, toward something else.” {2}

In a previous letter, dated 7th September 1990 ev, he wrote:

“We feel there can be no religious dogma about Satanism or the LHP: no subserviance to someone else’s ideas or ways of living. Each individual develops their own unique perspective and insight as a consequence of striving to achieve Adeptship – a perspective and insight which derives mainly from practical experience, both magickal and personal.” {3}

Thus, and importantly:

“Our authority, such as it is, is that deriving from and manifest in the accumulated individual pathei-mathos – the experience and the learning – of our members.” {1}

Or, as Anton Long has expressed it many times, one of the most important Dark Arts of the O9A is pathei-mathos: the individual learning that results from challenging and difficult personal experiences {4}.

In the O9A therefore, individual pathei-mathos is ‘the ultimate authority’. Not individuals, not some title, self-given or otherwise. Not Mr Anton “I claim no authority” Long; not his writings; not his diverse exeatic life; not his ‘esoteric philosophy’ that, presenced by others, is the O9A. Not what some O9A Adept – someone who has successfully undertaken the Seven Fold Way up to and including the rite of internal adept – says or writes. Not what some O9A ‘outer-representative’ – self-described, or otherwise – has said or written {5}.

For as Anton Long wrote, way back in 1991, everything ONA “can and should be surpassed, refined, changed, when others discover, experience, and attain knowledge and experience for themselves.” {6}

To enable others to so discover, experience, and attain knowledge and experience for themselves, the O9A has always made all its works freely available, showing a particular – and an anarchic – disdain for the principles of ‘copyright’ and ‘intellectual property’. For,

“Such publication lets others decide what is or is not worthwhile or valuable or interesting from an esoteric point of view – there is not, within the ONA, any control of esoteric information as a result of one or more individuals deciding what is ‘right’ or ‘true teachings’ – simply because individuality is the foundation of the ONA way […] This is the fundamental point: the responsibility for development ultimately rests with individual desire, just as each individual must make their own assessment of what is valuable and what is ‘ethical/just’ from their own experience.” {2}

Learning And Culture

Given the foregoing, it should be obvious that the O9A does not – as a collective, as an ‘order’, or otherwise – claim any particular authority. It is only one esoteric philosophy among others; albeit a distinctive, a sinister, an amoral, an adversarial one; and one open to and founded on the principle of change, adaptation, and development, by others.

As mentioned in the text The Discovery and Knowing of Satan,

“Our authority, such as it is, is that deriving from and manifest in the accumulated individual pathei-mathos – the experience and the learning – of our members.”

For the O9A, as it now is and as it has been during the past four decades, is the accumulated occult pathei-mathos of Anton Long and of those whose ancient pagan, hermetic {7}, and satanic, traditions (Camlad, Noctulians, Temple of the Sun) he inherited and/or personally studied and learned from {8}. A pathei-mathos, a study, and a learning, melded by Long himself into what is now known, among the occult cognoscenti and by certain academics, as both the esoteric philosophy of Anton Long and as the sinister tradition.

But, and importantly, it is this esoteric philosophy, this tradition, that now and in the future will be added to, and should be added to, and developed, by the pathei-mathos of those individuals who have followed it or been inspired by or used the three ways of individual change and individual evolution that this particular philosophy/tradition re-presents: the initiatory Seven Fold Way, the individual exeatic adversarial praxis of Dreccs and Niners, and the tradition of the Rounwytha.

Thus,

“One of the main reasons for the existence of esoteric groups such as the Order of Nine Angles is to be a living hereditary repository of a certain type of knowledge – kunnleik – and to personally, directly, encourage some individuals to acquire the culture, the habit, of learning – practical, scholarly, esoteric – and thus enable them to move in the traditional esoteric manner toward the goal of discovering and thence acquiring wisdom; and which wisdom is a balanced personal judgement and a particular knowledge of a pagan, Occult, kind to do with livings beings, human nature, Nature and ‘the heavens’. This involves possessing/developing certain esoteric faculties/skills; acquiring an honest knowing of one’s self, one’s character; possessing an Aeonic understanding; and thus discovering Reality beyond, and sans, all causal abstractions.

Being a living hereditary repository of a certain type of knowledge, esoteric and otherwise – that is, being akin to an ancestral, communal, pathei-mathos – the O9A grows and slowly develops as more knowledge and understanding are obtained, as more individuals undergo pathei-mathos, and as newer Dark Arts are developed. But the Occult essence – the ethos, the internal alchemy of individual change during the life of the individual, the individual discovery of lapis philosophicus, the Adeptus way, the Aeonic perspective – remains.” {9}

As an accumulated and accumulating esoteric pathei-mathos, the Order of Nine Angles is a new and an esoteric culture and one which manifests, which aids, not only the esoteric, the interior, the alchemical, evolution of individuals but also, because of and via its Logos of Kindred-Honour {10}, aids and indeed presences certain ways of living.

These ways of living are those where the Logos of Kindred-Honour is the only law and where the authority of individual judgement, and the necessity of individuals learning via pathei-mathos both esoteric and exoteric, are the norm, the standard.

A Sinister Anarchic Vision

The Order of Nine Angles – with its ancestral, communal, slowly accumulating pathei-mathos; with its Logos of Kindred-Honour; with its emphasis on the authority, the primacy, of individual authority and individual judgement – is both profoundly sinister and profoundly anarchic.

Profoundly sinister in that its aim, through those following or inspired by its esoteric-philosophy/sinister-tradition, is to ‘presence the dark’ and change individuals in particular sinisterly-numinous ways {11}. Profoundly anarchic in (i) that its Logos of Kindred-Honour, and its emphasis on the authority of the individual and of the individual judgement that pathei-mathos provides, replace the laws and the authority of the State; and (ii) that it encourages a return to the more pagan way of tribal and/or kindred communities over and above the impersonal ways of living of the modern State; and (iii) that it encourages individuals, via their own pathei-mathos, to develop, extend, refine, adapt, change, transform, and eventually, transcend, everything ONA, that is, what Anton Long himself has expounded and learned; and (iv) that it champions the open and free publication and distribution of esoteric information, of knowledge, and of the pathei-mathos of individuals; and (v) that it champions a re-discovery and re-presencing of the balancing, and pagan, muliebral qualities and abilities that the patriarchal, masculous, ethos of the present and the past have suppressed {12}.

This profoundly sinister and profoundly anarchic vision of Anton Long has been consistently at the heart of the ONA since its inception, manifest in some of the early public effusions of Anton Long in terms of anarchy, and the importance of personal honour, empathy, and pathei mathos (learning from practical experience).

Thus, in respect of anarchy, in a latter to Aquino dated 7th September 1990 ev, Anton Long directly and openly stated that “we [the Order of Nine Angles] uphold anarchism.” Thus, in respect of personal honour, in that same letter he stated that an “essential personal quality is honour born from the quest for self-excellence and self-understanding.” Thus, in respect of the muliebral ability of empathy, he wrote, in a 1970s text concerning the Nine Angles Rite (a text published in Sennitt’s Nox zine in the 1980s) that “such [esoteric] empathy is the only aim of the grade ritual of internal adept and, indeed, of initiation itself.”

Thus the emphasis, from the 1980s Black Book of Satan, through to Naos, and evident in most of the Satanic Letters, on self-development, self-discovery, on learning from practical experience and from one’s mistakes, on “each individual develop[ing] their own unique perspective and insight,” and on expecting his own works and effusions “to become transformed, by their own metamorphosis and that due to other individuals: changed, extended and probably ultimately transcended, may be even forgotten.”

Thus the Order of Nine Angles represents a grand (an aeonic), esoteric, and original, sinister vision with a decades-long inner consistency. A vision, a culture – with its esoteric individualism and its freedom from dogma and sycophancy – that is especially relevant today and which, over the past few years, has become increasingly influential, albeit that many of those so influenced are either unaware of who and what they have been influenced by, or are unwilling to credit Anton Long/O9A.

{3} This particular quotation from one of The Satanic Letters is interesting for another reason: the sly, mischievous, O9A (that is, Anton Long) early tactic of occasionally mis-spelling certain words (in this instance subservience) in order to try and (a) provoke the reader(s) into either making and propagating certain assumptions regarding the author and/or the O9A, or (b) provoke an instinctive immediate and judgemental reaction. This tactic is hinted at in one of The Satanic Letters, and – decades on – explicitly explained, as for example in the 2009 text Defending The ONA:

“In the days of typewritten letters, sometimes letters might be sent out with a word spelt in an unusual way, or containing deliberate spelling mistakes. Sometimes, the grammar was also unusual. Those who could not see beyond the outer form (the words; the syntax, and so on) to the essence (always contained quite clearly in such letters) so obviously failed, restricted as their apprehension was by the norms of their own times, by their own preconceptions, by society, or whatever.”

To his credit, Aquino either saw through the ruse, or dismissed the mis-spelling as a typo.

[Editorial Note, 2018 ev. According to O9A aural tradition this particular sly O9A tactic was also sometimes used in private letters and “limited edition” copies of MSS sent to some individuals so that if the letters or MSS appeared, or were quoted from, in print – or, latterly, published on the internet – then they could be traced back to the person to whom they were sent. In addition – again according to O9A aural tradition – since standardization of spelling in the English language is relatively recent then unusual or “incorrect” spelling of certain words harks back to olden times when a word such as Alchemy might be spelt Alchymie, alchymye, alkamye, alkemye, alkamy, and alkemie, among other variants, including a variant used in the 18th century in the US State of Virginia: achemy, qv. B. W. Green, Word-book of Virginia Folk-Speech published in 1899.

In regard to the spelling “subserviance” – spelt in modern English subservience – cf. the older word subserviate, hence the use of the unusual spelling by Mr Anton Long. The word subserviated occurs in a sermonizing Nazarene tract which has the ponderous title A Dialogical Discourse between Adonibezeck and one of the 60 Kings he tormented and kept under his Table: The Discourse supposed to be in the other World, and which was published in 1685.

In O9A aural tradition such “incorrectly” or unusually spelled words were often clues for the pedantically inclined sagacious, who might discover the source, and thence something of esoteric or scholarly interest, or who might be amused, as in this case by “60 Kings kept under a table” and “a discourse supposed to be in The Other World”, highlighting as these do both the real nature of Biblical tall-stories about some ancient “chosen” Hebrews and how such stories distorted the pagan ethos of the West, subservient as so many in the West were, and still are, to the theology and to the Hebrew ethos and to the un-pagan ethics embedded in the tall-stories contained in Biblia Hebraica and in the Nazarene Bible.]

{4} See, for example, Anton Long, Pathei-Mathos and The Initiatory Occult Quest. e-text, 2011. This text is included in the pdf compilation Empathy, Pathei-Mathos, and The Aeonic Perspective.

{5} In regard to the ‘outer representative’, as of the beginning of phase three (c. 2011-2012) of the century long O9A sinister strategy to disrupt the existing order, recruit a small number of suitable people (for the inner ONA), and aid the emergence of a new aeon based on the law of kindred honour, this particular causal form no longer serves a purpose. Which purpose was for a particular individual to maintain a temporary ‘external, causal, O9A presence’ via the dissemination of O9A MSS and the propagation of ONA theory and praxis. In effect, to aid the embedding of the ONA mythos in the collective psyche of the peoples of the West. Since this has most certainly been achieved – as witness, for instance, (i) the appearance of the Order of Nine Angles as the evil protagonists in several best-selling novels by mainstream writers such as Stephen Leather and Conrad Jones, and (ii) the mention of the O9A in mainstream books dealing with satanism and the occult – then that particular causal form is no longer required. Indeed, to continue it would be detrimental to the ‘open source’ and the collective way that the ONA mythos and ONA theory and praxis now needs to be (to paraphrase what AL wrote in his letter to Aquino dated 20th October 1990 ev) disseminated, developed, adapted, changed, extended, and transformed.

The three phases of the current decade, and past decades, are mentioned in texts such as the 119yf one Toward The Dark Formless Acausal. They are described in detail in the 122yf, and omega9alpha, document Geneseos Caput Tertium from which this is a quotation:

“The first and second phases were marked by the exoteric emphasis being on our form of Satanism, with the esoteric emphasis hidden and revealed only on a personal basis. The dating used in these phases was generally one of the following: ev, en, yf, eh. These related directly to our heretical tradition – as in yf and thus the causal form of NS – and to our traditional Satanism, as in ev, en, eh. The archetypal form here is Satan, propagated as both an adversarial individual praxis and as an acausal living entity.

The third phase is marked by the exoteric emphasis being on the development and propagation of sinister forms, such as clans, tribes, dreccs and niners, with the esoteric emphasis openly propagated, expressed as this esoteric aspect is, for example, in the Rounwytha tradition and by the sorcery that is the melding of sinister-numinous within and external to the individual. The dating used in the third phase is Year of Fayen (sometimes abbreviated to yfayen) and this relates to the shift away from overt Satanism toward the archetypal form Baphomet, both as a Dark Goddess, and as the sinister-numinous, which can manifest: (1) in men via the development of skills/faculties such as esoteric-empathy, and (2) in women by the cultivation of the sinister feminine.”

{8} A lot of the ancestral pathei-mathos Anton Long inherited he expressed in the five fictional stories that form the Deofel Quintet.

For instance, both The Giving and Breaking The Silence Down express something of the ancient Rounwytha tradition. The Falcifer story expresses elements of the Temple of the Sun tradition; while The Greyling Owl relates some aspects of the Fenland/Cantabrigian Noctulian tradition. In the novel The Temple of Satan all three traditions make an appearance.

{12} The muliebral qualities are manifest not only in the mythos of the female Baphomet, in the Rounwytha tradition and in the many Sapphic ONA nexions, but also in the esoteric empathy that Insight Roles, the Rite of Internal Adept, and the years-long ‘numinous’ preparations for the Rite of The Abyss, cultivate and develop. They are also manifest in the Logos of Kindred-Honour, which applies equally to all who are O9A irrespective of gender and personal sexual preference.